User blog:JimTheEagle/Standardization of Imagemaps
Imagemaps are important for a wiki like us. When you have a fictional universe, maps form the best way for those unfamiliar with it to get a feel for the world and its layout. Paul Stewart and Chris Riddell have been amazing enough to provide us sketches that we can use to give that added insight into the world they created. These imagemaps are powerful tools because they connect names and information with places on a physical map. However, navigation and presentation are equally important. Visitors will always form an opinion of us from our articles. If our articles are informative and tidy, visitors are more likely to come back. But if our articles don't follow our own policies or feel messy and unprofessional, it has the opposite effect. This is important because our layout and how consistent it is has a direct effect on the perceived quality of our information. Templates So, what can we do to help mitigate these effects and keep our wiki feeling tidy and professional? For a start, we can use templates. When you create a template, it can be used on any page and any changes to the template immediately affect pages all over the wiki. This means that navigation and presentation can be made uniform and is instantly updatable. ''' Imagemaps How does this apply to imagemaps? Well, imagemaps are '''large and obvious parts of our navigation landscape, so they need to be consistent. By using the same template to form the base of each image map and having each imagemap as template in its own right, we are able to instantly update every imagemap on the wiki or every occurrence of one specific imagemap. For uniformity within our navigation landscape, this is a powerful asset. However, it can't be maintained by just one user. Everyone should know not only what to do, but how the system works. Using templating can also help introduce some harder-to-achieve appearance enhancements. The code When you create a new imagemap, create it as a new template and use this syntax: You can type within the locations parameter just as if you were typing into an tag, because that's what your doing, except this one just has some additional formatting already thrown in. An imagemap page should look like this inside the editor: }|file=Farrowridges.jpg|locations= rect 282 152 354 226 Water Caverns rect 402 290 449 362 Five Falls rect 430 382 525 435 Farrow Lake rect 521 318 600 365 The Levels rect 504 89 685 266 Western Woods}} If the imagemap is completely ready for use, the template may be removed. All imagemaps should generally have the template. It means that the imagemap was built using the template and therefore is up to date with any changes made to the base presentation of imagemaps. I'd like to thank Gloamglozer for her wonderful blog post containing information about imagemaps and how to create them. Getting technical Here's the code from inside the template: Category:ImageMaps Category:Blog posts Category:Organisation